In his bid to become LA's first Latino mayor for over a century, Antonio Villaraigosa has moved in front of James Hahn

“PERHAPS the ugliest city on earth”, is how Christopher Isherwood described the place where he spent much of his life. Antonio Villaraigosa, a city councillor who is bidding to become the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles since Cristobal Aguilar left office in 1872, prefers to call it “the most diverse city anywhere in the world”. Plenty of Angelenos would agree with both descriptions.

America's second-biggest city, with 3.9m people, is monstrously hard to run. Its patchwork sprawl is almost twice as large as Singapore. It boasts a dysfunctional school system, struggling to cope with children who speak some 92 different languages at home, a troubled police department and (according to a new report this week) the most congested roads in the country. Thanks to a city charter that still focuses on limiting his powers, its mayor has scant control over any of these things.

Yet with only a few days before their May 17th run-off, both Mr Villaraigosa and the incumbent mayor, James Hahn, are spending vast amounts of money (most of it in mud-slinging TV ads) campaigning for that job. Mr Villaraigosa, with a Clintonesque facility to embrace any potential voter, is clearly the front-runner: he won 33% of the vote in the non-partisan primary in March, compared with Mr Hahn's 24%, and he has been well ahead in the polls.

Yet the race is narrowing. In the Los Angeles Times poll, Mr Villaraigosa's lead has shrunk from 18 points in March to eleven, and Mr Hahn's team claims a private poll puts their man in a statistical dead-heat. Add to this momentum a few more vicious TV ads accusing Mr Villaraigosa of being soft on LA's gangs and in the pocket of out-of-state businessmen, and conceivably Mr Hahn will pull off a surprise victory—just as he did four years ago, when his ads savaged Mr Villaraigosa for having attempted to win clemency for a cocaine-dealer.

Most outsiders puzzle why a city whose population is 47% Latino does not have a Latino mayor. Yet the real question for insiders is why Mr Hahn should be facing defeat in the first place. After all, the economy is in good enough shape for the mayor to announce an electorally convenient 10.5% increase in the city budget for the fiscal year beginning on July 1st. And he also has the advantage of belonging to the city's only real dynasty: his father, Kenneth, was ten times elected a Los Angeles County supervisor.

One explanation for Mr Hahn's problems is that he has annoyed blacks by dismissing Bernard Parks, the black chief of the violence-prone Los Angeles Police Department. This may be overstated. After all, Mr Parks sought vengeance by standing against Mr Hahn in the March primary—and lost. Also, he was replaced by the former New York police chief, William Bratton, who has since managed to bring violent crime down by almost 38%. (Sensibly, Mr Villaraigosa has said he will keep Mr Bratton in office.) And racial politics still probably favour Mr Hahn: blacks, who make up 11% of the population (and a far greater proportion of government jobs), may be reluctant to vote for what could be the first of many Latino mayors.

A bigger problem for Mr Hahn is corruption. His administration is under federal investigation for doling out “pay to play” city contracts. Mr Hahn is yet to be implicated, though you would not know that from Mr Villaraigosa's TV ads. Mr Hahn has fired back at Mr Villaraigosa for accepting questionable donations (some since returned) from Florida. Most voters seem to have decided that neither man is exactly a saint. Nearly two-thirds of them in the Los Angeles Times poll said the investigations would not affect their vote.

Mr Hahn's greatest challenge may just be that a city with a short attention span is bored with him. Leaving aside the fracas over the police chief, he has hardly set city politics alight. Whereas Mr Villaraigosa delights in pressing the flesh, Mr Hahn shrinks from it—and his speeches are often dull lists of what he has achieved and intends to achieve (for example, setting up a Traffic Safety and Congestion Relief Plan, “which will identify and fix Los Angeles's 25 worst intersections each year”). At a Simon Wiesenthal commemoration last weekend, Mr Villaraigosa found the right sort of eloquence; his rival's speech was short and perfunctory—and he left early.

The mayor has the support of several trade unions and Senator Dianne Feinstein. Mr Villaraigosa's support is both broader and glitzier. It includes the other Democratic senator, Barbara Boxer; “Magic” Johnson, a one-time basketball hero, who is now a leading black businessman; Richard Riordan, Mr Hahn's predecessor as mayor, who could bring in many Schwarzenegger Republicans; Bob Hertzberg, who was narrowly beaten in the March primary and could bring in Jewish voters from the prosperous western part of the city; and, naturally, plenty of local Latino leaders.

Will anybody vote? Turnout is unlikely to be much above 30%, with even lower levels among Latinos. This apathy may seem reprehensible, but it is not entirely illogical. The mayor has precious little control over much of what angers the voters. That leaves the rivals either promising what they cannot deliver—Mr Villaraigosa talks of smaller school classes—or swapping mundane pledges to fill potholes and make the traffic lights work better.

According to a survey in March by the Public Policy Institute of California, only a third of LA's residents trust the city government to do what is right most of the time—roughly the same proportion that plans to leave the Los Angeles region within the next five years. If Mr Villaraigosa does achieve his historic victory, his problems will only just have begun.